WILLIAM SHATNER: A giant, hairy beast
that walks on two legs.
A ferocious killer wolf
with a taste for human flesh.
And a red-eyed, nocturnal bird of prey
that is believed to be a harbinger of doom.
♪ ♪
Throughout the world, there have been
countless sightings of bizarre creatures
that, based on eyewitness accounts,
can only be described as monsters.
Fearsome, grotesque beasts
that cannot be explained by science.
Is it possible that there really are terrifying monsters
lurking in the shadows of our planet?
Well, that is what we’ll try and find out.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: Bigfoot researcher Matt Moneymaker and a colleague
are investigating reported Bigfoot sightings
in a wooded area near the town of Kent.
After spending years pursuing Bigfoot in hopes
of seeing one himself, Matt is eager to find out
whether there really is a giant creature in these woods.
We were staked out along a road.
The guy I was with was about 60 feet away.
And at about 2:30 a.m.,
something comes walking down the road.
I see something.
He sees it first through night vision.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: Matt rushes over to investigate
and is stopped dead in his tracks by the sound of...
(growling)
...inhuman growling.
MATT MONEYMAKER: This thing steps out,
a very big, tall, hair-covered thing...
(roaring)
...standing out there growling at me.
When you’ve got something that big that close to you,
you could see it well enough to know that must be a Bigfoot.
So I just kind of backed up and walked away.
(growling)
I was pretty happy at that point, because I’m thinking
if this one’s going to do that reliably,
then this is a place that we’re going to get
some video footage of them,
if we’re coming here with the right kind of gear.
SHATNER: But when Matt returned with camera equipment
to document the encounter,
the creature had vanished.
Although Matt was not able to photograph the large,
hairy beast that he witnessed,
he remains convinced that what he saw
was, in fact, Bigfoot.
It’s one of those things that sounds so over the top,
but after I had a face-to-face encounter,
I knew it was exactly the same thing
that all the witnesses around there had described.
SHATNER: The encounter inspired Matt to found
the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, or BFRO.
MONEYMAKER: The roots of it are people who were sharing information.
We were sharing sighting reports mainly
from different parts of the country.
And I came up with the idea that--
why don’t we put all these into a website?
You know, sort it by county and state
so people can look up reports.
And when we did that, it worked really well.
Lots of people started submitting reports.
SHATNER: According to the BFRO, there have been more than
3,500 credible Bigfoot sightings since 1960.
Although science has yet to prove the existence
of the legendary man-beast,
that hasn’t stopped Bigfoot
from becoming a full-fledged phenomenon.
CHRIS BADER: Bigfoot is literally everywhere.
There are Bigfoot stories in Nevada.
There are Bigfoot stories in Nebraska, Florida, Texas.
Literally every part of the country
has its own stories and legends of Bigfoot.
It’s likely wherever you live in this country,
you are within 100 miles of a place
that purportedly has a Bigfoot.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: If these sightings are of a real creature,
then what exactly is Bigfoot?
And how did this phenomenon begin?
(crunching steps)
TOK THOMPSON: Bigfoot is generally reported
to be a very large, very furry, uh, hominid creature.
Something like a person, uh, but not a person.
Seen very often remotely in the forest.
And with various stories about sightings or about footprints
that really are pretty widespread
in many, many communities in the United States and in Canada.
Before 1958, people didn’t use the word Bigfoot.
But it was in 1958 in Northern California
guys building a road found footprints
around their gear when they would come back in the morning.
And a guy named Jerry Crew made plaster footprints
of these tracks and showed them to a reporter
in Eureka, and they dubbed it Bigfoot.
That was where the name first originated
and got into American vocabulary.
SHATNER: Photos of Jerry Crew’s cast of giant footprints
made headlines across the country.
Many Americans came to believe that a tall,
bipedal, apelike creature roamed
the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
I grew up in Washington State
where it’s hard to underestimate Bigfoot’s power.
♪ ♪
Bigfoot is the mascot of different companies.
Bigfoot is all over billboards.
As a young boy in Washington State,
I fully believed in Bigfoot’s existence.
SHATNER: In 1967, interest in Bigfoot surged
when an investigator named Roger Patterson
captured incredible footage
of a creature that matched the description of Bigfoot
near Bluff Creek in Northern California.
(growling)
Patterson’s film became an instant sensation,
but skeptics claimed
that it had to be a man
in a monkey suit.
One of the issues when it comes to people believing
in Bigfoot existing is, let’s face it,
mainstream sciences shun away from this topic.
However, amateur researchers are trying to pick up the slack,
bridge that gap between amateur and mainstream science.
SHATNER: Bigfoot researchers claim that the vast majority
of Bigfoot sightings are sincere
and that hoaxes represent only a small fraction of reports.
They also point out that stories
of Bigfoot-like animals are not merely a recent fad.
Believe it or not, more than 3,000 years ago,
the ancient Babylonians told stories
of a creature that sounds an awful lot like Bigfoot.
Except they called it Enkidu.
♪ ♪
Enkidu is a hairy, wild
man-creature with super strength,
and he’s fearsome, he’s ready and willing
to defend this wild territory that he inhabits.
The king, Gilgamesh, becomes his soulmate,
basically-- best friends.
So, this king becomes this amazing hero
through his relationship with this wild man
that has shown him how to negotiate the boundaries
between humanity and wildness.
SHATNER: Since that time, descriptions of so-called "wild men,"
half-human, half-ape beasts,
have popped up throughout history, all over the world.
JONATHAN YOUNG: In the Caucasus, there was something called the Alma
that was a big monster, a nature creature.
In Australia, there’s the aboriginal version,
which they call it a Yowie.
There is the Yeti in the Himalayas.
So there are local variations,
but the story is more or less the same:
very big, seemingly animallike.
Or is it human or is it some hybrid?
There’s the point.
SHATNER: In North America, there are Native American legends
that go back centuries,
long before the discoveries made by Jerry Crew
or Roger Patterson.
LYNNE McNEILL: We know that Sasquatch, the preeminent Bigfoot creature
that we have in the United States
located in the Pacific Northwest,
that very word, Sasquatch, comes from a Salish tribal word
that means wild man or hairy man.
YOUNG: The natives of the Northwest say
that there are creatures that walk upright and only at night.
And can speak in their language.
TODD NEISS: I found in speaking with indigenous peoples
that they don’t describe them as an animal at all.
They call them the First Ones or the Old Ones.
These were the tribe that was here before we got here.
♪ ♪
Could Bigfoot be one of man’s ancient ancestors?
According to many cultures around the world,
it’s a distinct possibility.
And if Bigfoot does exist, could it mean
that we might share our world with other strange creatures?
Perhaps a clue can be found in Texas,
where legend has it that a vicious monster
prowls the night and has an insatiable thirst
for blood.
SHATNER: After purchasing a brood of chickens
from a neighboring ranch, Phylis Canion makes a series
of gruesome discoveries inside her brand-new henhouse.
I brought the chickens home, and I had them for about two weeks.
And I went outside, and one of the chickens was dead.
What makes it unusual
is the chicken was still laying there.
And with the amount of predators that we have
in the state of Texas,
any predator would have taken the chicken and eaten it.
♪ ♪
(camera bulb whooshes)
SHATNER: Over the next few weeks, Phylis collected the remains
of 27 more of her chickens,
each one killed in the same inexplicable fashion.
Every one of them had been opened up in the thorax area,
the feathers missing, and what appeared to me
to be no blood on the ground.
So, that told me then whatever it was
was not interested in the meat but interested in the blood.
And when I was talking to friends and neighbors about it,
they all immediately said, "Oh, my gosh,
"that’s the behavior of a chupacabra.
It’s going to kill the animal and suck the blood."
SHATNER: "Chupacabra."
To those who claim to have encountered one,
it is a fearsome monster.
Chupacabra means "goat sucker."
And it’s a really creepy-looking creature.
Some people say it looks like some kind of
strange hybrid-like dog.
The continental North American chupacabra, uh,
is a four-legged, or quadrupedal animal
about the size of a dog, completely hairless
with a bluish-gray elephant hide type of covering.
They also display a number of abnormal characteristics.
Oftentimes, their limbs are disproportionate lengths.
So they’re very grotesque, odd, weird-looking animals.
Certain that what was preying on her chicken coop
was not a coyote or any other known canine,
Phylis began to consider whether it might be a chupacabra.
And then one morning, she got her answer.
One Saturday morning, I got a very early call, 7:00.
My neighbor rancher called and said, "Oh, my gosh.
"The strangest animal has been hit and killed
in front of the Canion Ranch."
So, I got in the truck, drove over there and I brought it back
and I took a 50-pound feed sack
and I cut it in half and laid it on the ground
and I laid the animal on it to give everybody
a perspective of the size of the animal.
I have seen mangy coyotes all of my life,
and this had no hair on it and no indication at all
that the skin was infested with any type
of skin disorder from mange or anything else.
It just did not have any hair on it at all.
SHATNER: Phylis sent tissue samples
from the dead creature out for analysis.
After waiting expectantly for weeks,
she was surprised by the results.
So, when they called me, they said,
"Well, it’s coyote on the maternal side
and Mexican wolf on the paternal."
The DNA tests indicating that the...
the animal was a... was a hybrid, essentially,
between a Mexican wolf and a coyote
is a little surprising in the fact
that those species don’t typically hybridize.
But it’s not entirely impossible.
We do know that the ranges of those two species do overlap
in Arizona and Texas and northern Mexico,
so it’s at least physically possible
that they could encounter each other, um, to form hybrids.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: With such conclusive DNA results,
many considered the case closed.
But according to Phylis,
something was not quite adding up.
The mystery of the whole thing
was the manner in which every chicken was killed.
It would suck all of the blood out.
So, we know that it’s coyote and Mexican wolf,
but neither of those animals suck blood.
So, even though this animal has that DNA, what is it?
Why would it have that behavior?
When the taxidermist mounted it for me,
he had to get a coyote mold and a wolf mold,
and blend them together to make the hide fit.
The tail is longer than a wolf tail or a coyote tail.
The neck, the ears, everything was so extreme.
It took him forever to get it mounted.
We had about 13 different specialists
from around the world come and look at it.
And to date, they’ve all left scratching their head
like the day they came in,
because they just cannot figure it out as well.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: If they really exist,
are chupacabra merely the result of natural selection gone wrong?
Or could this grotesque monster
be the result of not natural causes
but manmade ones?
There are some who believe the answer
is a disturbing yes.
Through the course of my research
on the Texas chupacabras,
I found a direct correlation between sightings
on Phylis Canion’s property and elsewhere,
and coal-burning power plants.
Coal-burning power plants,
in fact, emit huge amounts of sulfur dioxide
and other hard metals like lead into the atmosphere.
And in recent studies, scientists have found
that sulfur dioxide is, in fact, a mutagen.
It altered the cellular makeup or genetic makeup
of laboratory mice.
So, in fact, this pollution could be having
a similar effect on these Texas coyotes or other canids.
Chemicals in the environment
can absolutely cause mutations to animals in-in the wild.
We saw this in Minnesota when a classroom
out on a field trip discovered a pond
with frogs that had extra legs or missing limbs
or body features in the wrong position.
And these were most likely caused by some type
of environmental contaminant.
There is actually a type of chupacabra
that’s been reported from parts of Puerto Rico.
The Puerto Rican chupacabra is described as about
three and a half to five feet tall,
standing on two legs, fangs, claws,
and strangely a row of spikes going down its back.
Why are there so many different versions of the chupacabra,
and why are they so radically different-looking
in terms of the Puerto Rican version
versus the North American version versus other versions?
So, in fact, pollution could be having
a similar effect to create all types of strange creatures.
♪ ♪
Is the chupacabra a genetically mutated animal
that evolved as a result of industrial pollution?
Perhaps, but then again,
monsters have been reported for centuries,
long before the onset of modern civilization.
For instance, in 18th-century France,
more than 100 people fell victim
to a ravenous, wolflike creature that was known
as the Beast of Gévaudan.
SHATNER: On a warm summer morning in this farming region
of south-central France,
14-year-old Jeanne Boulet
leaves home to tend her flock of sheep.
♪ ♪
By sundown, she’s dead.
-(growling) -(roaring)
(screaming)
Murdered by a mysterious animal
that reportedly mutilated her body,
severed her head and ripped out her heart.
Jeanne Boulet was the first documented casualty
of a monster that many people believed
was roaming around south-central France
beginning in the late spring of 1764.
By the end of September,
another ten or so casualties, however, had appeared.
GERHARD: La Bête du Gévaudan, also known as the Beast of Gévaudan,
was a mysterious wolflike creature
which mounted a murderous rampage
over a three-year span within the 18th century.
The Beast frequently attacked women and young children
who had been assigned the task
of herding sheep and cattle in remote mountainous meadows.
And in many cases,
they were rather defenseless and vulnerable.
(growling)
SHATNER: Between 1764 and 1767,
the so-called Beast of Gévaudan
terrorized the Margeride Mountain region
of southern France.
According to historical records,
more than 100 people were brutally killed.
SMITH: The Beast of the Gévaudan’s ravages
did incite panic among the people.
And we know this largely from evidence from journalists
and others who were commenting about
the activities of the Beast.
By early 1765, newspapers all across France,
and indeed all across Europe and in America,
were reporting on the Beast of the Gévaudan.
His exploits, the various hunts for the Beast,
the various mysteries surrounding it,
which is why so many people were transfixed by this story.
(crackling)
GERHARD: There were many attempts to hunt down the Beast.
People in the Gévaudan region typically did not own guns,
but there were posses formed.
Groups that would go out in the woods and literally
beat the brush with pitchforks,
sticks, knives, whatever types of weapons were available.
However, the hunt for the Beast really ramped up
when King Louis XV became involved.
He brought in a professional wolf hunter named d’Enneval,
who allegedly killed over 100 wolves,
but the killing still did not end.
SHATNER: According to multiple reports, the beast resembled a wolf
but was unlike any canine that was known to man.
GERHARD: Many of the local villagers noted as saying it resembles
a very large wolf, but the Beast of Gévaudan
attacked and killed people
in a nature that was very unlike a wolf.
(growling)
-The nature of these attacks... -(howling)
...the way that this thing was decapitating people...
-(roaring) -(screaming)
...disemboweling people,
this was something completely different.
SMITH: One of the reasons this becomes such a magnetic story,
it’s because there were always new strange stories
about the Beast’s behavior,
its appearance, its strange abilities.
The peasants on the ground were describing it as
having the ability to walk on its hind legs,
glowing eyes, and having five or six talons
rather than four.
They didn’t use the word "werewolf."
They used descriptions of this creature
that made it easy to believe
that this could indeed be a werewolf.
GERHARD: The Beast of Gévaudan is one of France’s
most enduring and popular mysteries.
There are museums.
There are statues.
There are songs. There are stories.
This was like a real-life nightmare.
To this day, the Beast of Gévaudan is celebrated
in French culture and it really has a profound effect on people.
SHATNER: The descriptions of the Beast were so terrifying
that it’s not surprising locals thought
it was some kind of supernatural monster.
But there were scientists at the time
who proposed a different theory.
SMITH: Among the many hypotheses that emerged
was that the beast might be an African hyena.
The hyena was this very mysterious creature
that lots of naturalists and others wrote about
in the 1750s and ’60s.
The general description of the Beast of Gévaudan
was a wolflike creature but bigger,
the size of a mule or a calf, perhaps.
It had a large head.
It had a long muzzle, lined with razor-sharp teeth.
Pointy ears.
A long tail with a tuft of fur on the end.
The coat of fur was typically described
as a reddish-brown or gray,
with a black stripe running down the back and a white breast.
These are hyena-like characteristics.
CORBIN MAXEY: Back in the day, kings and even people of status
had exotic pets, they had exotic zoos.
Who’s to say that a hyena didn’t escape?
If you take a look at the victims,
their chest cavities torn apart,
their limbs missing, their heads decapitated,
this all resembles attacks of a hyena.
SHATNER: Could the Beast of Gévaudan have been an escaped African hyena?
Perhaps.
(roaring)
But while that theory may make sense,
the best clue scientists have today
about the Beast’s identity
was obtained on the day it was reportedly killed.
The Beast’s reign of terror ended on June 19, 1767,
when a local hunter named Jean Chastel
felled the monster with one shot of a silver bullet.
(gunshot)
♪ ♪
After Chastel shot this strange creature,
the killings actually stopped, so everyone was in agreement
that-that he had actually killed the beast.
♪ ♪
A surgeon who conducted an autopsy determined
that while it resembled a wolf, it was not a wolf.
And in fact, it possessed 40 teeth
compared to a wolf’s 42 teeth, which is quite strange.
♪ ♪
The Beast’s remains were paraded around
the Gévaudan region for weeks thereafter.
And by the time the carcass was taken
to the Palace of Versailles and presented to King Louis XV,
it was so smelly that he immediately demanded
that it be removed from the palace.
And to this day, nobody knows what happened
to those remains-- they vanished.
♪ ♪
Ultimately, while some people feel
the Beast of Gévaudan may have been a supernatural phenomenon,
the deaths, the occurrences documented, they’re real.
And the Beast of Gévaudan remains a great mystery.
(growling)
Was the Beast of Gévaudan a common wolf
or something far more terrifying?
Either way, the people of France believed
that the Beast needed to be hunted down and killed.
But fighting back against monsters
may not always be an option.
In fact, there have been reports
of another wolflike creature, in Utah.
One that is so fearsome and so powerful
that not even bullets can stop it.
SHATNER: Here on 512 acres of rugged land
lies a remote cattle ranch.
But according to local legend, this desert landscape
is also home to a creature of unspeakable evil.
(snarling)
A creature known as the Skinwalker.
SKINNER: A Skinwalker is a shape-shifter.
It can become many things: a fox, a coyote, a wolf.
There are these recorded stories of bipedal creatures
that are walking around with wolflike heads.
The locals on the reservation, they won’t talk about it
because even mentioning the name of the Skinwalker
invites these things in.
♪ ♪
SHATNER: Skinwalkers.
Shape-shifting werewolves
who dwell not in remote forests of Eastern Europe
but in the remote desert regions of North America.
Experienced ranch hands Terry and Gwen Sherman
purchased the ranch and the surrounding area.
Almost immediately, they find themselves face-to-face
with something they would later describe as pure evil.
One day, Terry had gone up to check on his cattle and noticed
this extremely large, what appeared to be a wolf
walking around on his property.
(snarling)
It grabbed one of the calves by the snout
and began to tear at it.
So he pulls out his .357 Magnum
and shoots point-blank.
And the wolf doesn’t react.
It doesn’t appear fazed at all.
So he grabs his deer hunting rifle
and shoots the wolf to knock it down.
A piece of fur and flesh flies off of the wolf.
But, again, completely unfazed,
and at this point, the wolf is kind of trotting off
into the distance, casually.
SHATNER: Leveling his rifle, Terry cautiously
followed the wolf’s trail,
only to discover it had disappeared.
♪ ♪
In the days and weeks that followed,
the Shermans began to wonder if what they encountered
was a normal wolf
or something more.
(howling)
SKINNER: In the case of the bulletproof wolf, what’s interesting
is that wolves are not native to the state of Utah
for, I think, the past 100 years or so.
GERHARD: The werewolf of legend is described as looking
very much like a regular wolf except much larger.
And oftentimes, it is said to be
sort of bloodthirsty and cunning.
We have lots of interesting legends around the world.
For example, in Russia, they’re known
as the vârcolac or the bodark.
In France, you have the loup-garou.
In Scotland, the wulver, and in South America, the lobizon.
And even in countries where you don’t traditionally
have wolves, you have similar legends.
For example, in India, there are weretigers.
And in Africa, wereleopards and werehyenas.
And even in Mexico, werejaguars.
We have to acknowledge that the notion
of a shape-shifter, like a werewolf,
something that combines the elements
of human and animal together into one single body,
from a scientific perspective, is quite troubling.
(growling)
But the fact that these legends
are so widespread is quite intriguing.
SHATNER: An enormous, bloodthirsty, cunning wolf
that also happens to be bulletproof?
Is it possible that the Shermans encountered
one of the werewolves that may have been haunting
Skinwalker Ranch for centuries?
And if so, what physical evidence is there
to support such a fantastic notion?
SKINNER: There has been numerous reports
of cattle mutilations that occur not only on Skinwalker Ranch
but the entire Uinta Basin.
GERHARD: Many of the accounts of animal mutilations
from Skinwalker Ranch describe animal carcasses
that have almost been surgically dissected.
Certain large cats can make very clean, precise wounds.
Things like mountain lions.
But it is notable that you have so many accounts
of weird livestock mutilations from Skinwalker Ranch.
This is very hard to explain in terms of the natural world.
SHATNER: With so many accounts of cattle mutilations
and sightings of unusually large and ferocious wolves,
it is difficult to escape the notion that something strange
is prowling the grounds of Skinwalker Ranch.
But according to some scientists,
that doesn’t necessarily mean
that people are seeing a werewolf.
One of the really fascinating theories that relates
to these monstrous wolves from Skinwalker Ranch
is that these could, in fact, be surviving representatives
of a species known as dire wolves, Canis dirus.
These were very robust wolves that lived
during the Pleistocene epoch up until about 11,500 years ago,
and they were very prevalent in North America.
They were certainly much larger and stockier than modern wolves.
So it’s not beyond the realm of possibility
that a species from 11,000 years ago may have survived
in small pockets in certain remote areas of North America.
♪ ♪
Is the Skinwalker a rare breed of animal that simply
hasn’t been identified yet by mainstream science?
Or could it be exactly what witnesses insist it is:
a werewolf?
Well, if a shape-shifting canine
sounds too frightening to be true,
then just wait till you hear about our next monster.
It’s a flying beast with glowing red eyes
that has been seen in the skies above West Virginia,
and it’s known as the Mothman.
SHATNER: Linda Sigman and her boyfriend
head out for a quiet nighttime drive.
Far beyond the city lights, they pull over
to do some amateur stargazing.
After a few minutes, they realize they’re not alone.
We got out and we sat on the car,
and we’re sitting there talking for a little bit, and...
I noticed a bright star over to my right.
And all of a sudden, it started to get bigger.
And it turned bright red and started to glow,
and like it burst through the clouds.
And it came right over in front of the car, and we looked up,
and the object was so big that we couldn’t see
the night sky or the stars or anything.
(engine cranking, sputtering)
When my boyfriend tried to start the car and it wouldn’t start,
finally got the car started and we started to pull forward,
and I saw him.
And he appeared to be
a large flying man with wings.
It was the creature
that I perceive to be Mothman.
(screeching)
His wings were back, and he was anywhere between
eight and nine feet tall, and as we were going around a turn,
the Mothman flew and flew into the trees.
I don’t know what else it could’ve been.
SHATNER: The Mothman?
A large, red-eyed, human-sized creature that flies?
But if such a creature exists, where could it have come from?
GERHARD: Mothman is one of the most enigmatic creatures
in the annals of the unexplained.
And first gained public notoriety
in November of 1966.
And within a matter of days and weeks,
there were dozens or perhaps hundreds of sightings
of this creature around the Point Pleasant area,
causing a mass hysteria situation.
♪ ♪
Skeptics have attributed the Mothman sightings
to a misidentification of giant owls
or even a crane that is local to the area.
There’s all kinds of other explanations
that have been given, but when you interview
the people that actually saw and experienced this,
they’re not talking about anything
that is conventionally known.
DAVID SPINKS: West Virginia people are outdoorsy people.
They know all the animals in the woods.
Most are avid outdoorsmen, hunters,
fishermen, they know the difference
between an owl and a Mothman type creature.
GERHARD: We have to consider that the Mothman’s behavior,
which involved chasing cars at over 100 miles an hour,
taking straight up off the ground like a helicopter,
none of those would indicate any type of flesh-and-blood animal.
SHATNER: Chasing cars at over 100 miles an hour?
If true, then this thing is no owl.
At least not a normal one.
♪ ♪
But for the residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia,
the more pressing question is whether the Mothman
is a friend or a foe.
It’s been seen a lot of times right before tragedies happen.
That’s the only common thing we know.
It seems to show up at tragedies.
JEFF WAMSLEY: On December 15, 1967,
the Silver Bridge, which spanned
from Point Pleasant over to Kanauga, Ohio,
collapsed at about 5:00 on a Friday evening.
Uh, it was the worst bridge disaster in U.S. history.
46 people died.
I was six when the bridge fell.
And I remember at that time there were people that claimed
that they seen a large bird flying back and forth, you know,
across the river before the bridge fell.
NICK REDFERN: The official story is that it was just wear and tear
and the 46 people who were killed
just didn’t really stand a chance.
There are rumors that the Mothman was seen
around the time that the bridge collapsed.
So, there was inevitably talk around town that somehow
the Mothman had either caused the tragedy
or, in a strange way,
was kind of like a grim reaper for many people.
GERHARD: To this day, residents of Point Pleasant draw a connection
between the Mothman and this bridge collapse,
perhaps perceiving the Mothman’s appearance
as some type of premonition or omen of the tragedy.
JOHN HIPES: I would say probably in Point Pleasant it’s 50/50.
50% of the people believe that Mothman caused
the Silver Bridge tragedy, and the other 50% believe that
he may have been here as a warning
to get everyone on guard that something terrible may happen.
Is it possible that, contrary to popular belief,
the Mothman is a force for good?
It’s an interesting notion
and suggests that some strange creatures
may have more in common with humans than we realize.
For instance, there have been reports
of a bizarre beast that dwells in the swamps of South Carolina
and is said to be part man...
...and part reptile.
17-year-old Christopher Davis stops to change a flat tire
deep in the back roads of Scape Ore Swamp,
and he quickly senses
that he is not alone.
About the time he’s putting the jack and the flat tire
into the trunk of his car,
he looks up and he sees something
coming at him in the moonlight.
The closer this thing got,
the more he knew this wasn’t a person.
He looked up and he saw
a greenish-looking figure,
maybe about seven to eight foot tall
and arms that draped down to the side
with three claws on each hand.
(chittering)
SHATNER: Sensing he could be in danger,
Christopher bolts into the car
and drives away as fast as he can.
-(engine starts) -(chittering)
Christopher looked in his rearview mirror,
and could see this thing pursuing him.
He was completely frightened,
utterly overwhelmed by what he saw coming at him.
Eventually, it disappeared into the darkness.
SHATNER: Christopher got home safe and sound.
But his terrifying story quickly spread through the media.
Newspapers and television stations
jumped on the bizarre encounter.
NEWS ANCHOR: Deep in the Scape Ore Swamp of South Carolina,
there reportedly lives a creature
that is part man and part beast.
A creature that 17-year-old Christopher Davis
claims attacked his car late one night
on this lonely country road.
Seven feet tall.
Long arms. Red eyes.
STAMEY: There was a media frenzy once the story got out.
There were stories in newspapers in Korea about the Lizard Man.
And that’s just a tribute
to the viral-ness of the Lizard Man.
SHATNER: During the media frenzy, dozens of other eyewitnesses
began contacting the Lee County Sheriff’s Office.
They all claimed to have had similar encounters
with a strange, three-fingered creature
that appeared to be part man and part reptile.
But rather than dismiss such reports,
law enforcement took them quite seriously.
They had the witnesses come in.
They interviewed them,
in some cases gave them polygraph tests.
And all of the witnesses
that reported sightings of the Lizard Man were credible.
(hissing)
SHATNER: Could there really be a reptile species
that evolved to walk upright like humans?
And if so, is it possible that there are bizarre
human-and-reptile hybrids that are still alive today?
STAMEY: There have been a number of other sightings
of the Lizard Man outside of Lee County
and Sumter County in South Carolina.
There’s some in Europe. There’s some in South Africa.
Every one of them was about six to eight feet tall
with red eyes.
It always had red eyes.
That is one commonality that you can’t get over.
And so, it is certainly possible that the Lizard Man is real.
So, what do you think?
Do we share our planet with Lizard Men,
otherworldly beasts and bloodthirsty wolves?
May seem hard to believe.
That is, until you come face-to-face
with one of these creatures yourself.
So perhaps we should heed the warnings
of the eyewitnesses, just in case
there really are dangerous monsters on our planet that,
for the moment, remain unexplained.
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY A+E NETWORKS